Blood and Burning

1

I f*****g hated this.

There had to be at least 20 students down here. They all were ushered in by Conrad, and now, they were blocking my one and only exit.

Assholes.

The door directly across from where I stood led to an endless maze of hallways. I couldn’t be paid enough to set foot in those Godforsaken hallways.

Conrad allowed the students a moment to gape at their surroundings. They all were. But what the f**k were they looking at?

The walls were dingy, off-white, and stained with old, splattered blood. The concrete floors were stained, too, and they were strewn with random debris. The fluorescent lights overhead were dim. One was flickering.

This room was empty, because it served a very specific purpose. The students who attended these demonstrations had to sign a release form, because Conrad couldn’t risk f*****g up his funding. He didn’t care about any of these people otherwise.

“In April of 2021, an Alpha werewolf killed the last Imprimis,” Conrad began. “The death of the last Imprimis drastically decreased the number of vampires all around the world.” He paused. “Is there anybody here who does not know what an Imprimis is?”

A few people standing before us in the dank little basement room raised their hands.

Conrad nodded, and not a hair on his meticulously-styled, heavily product-laden head moved. “The Imprimis were the first vampires to walk the earth.”

I wondered if I knocked on his head, like knocking on a door, would his hair crack like an eggshell from all that damn product?

“Why did the werewolf kill the Imprimis?” a woman, standing near the front of the crowd, piped up.

“We’re unsure of his motives,” Conrad admitted. “His pack is the largest in the country, by far. He’s known for being quite violent, to say the least. We speculate that the Alpha who came before him, his father, had an unresolved dispute with the Imprimis at the time of his death.”

Another woman, no, a girl—she couldn’t possibly be any older than 20—asked, “Why did the death of the Imprimis so drastically decrease the number of—”

“Can anyone answer this question?” Conrad interrupted her.

I rolled my eyes. If this girl was genuinely asking a question like this, why was she even here?

“When you kill a vampire, you kill every vampire they’ve ever created,” someone said.

“Correct,” Conrad said, with a smile that didn’t come close to reaching his muddy brown eyes. “Most of the time, this chain reaction kills just a handful of vampires. Five to ten on average, twenty at most. Since the death of the Imprimis, vampire covens are smaller. They’ve tried to rebuild but they’ve struggled, since so many of them meet their end with us.”

The girl spoke again. “But wait,” she frowned, “wouldn’t killing the last Imprimis have wiped out the entire species? That chain reaction should’ve killed them all—whoever he turned, and then whoever they turned, and then—”

“I like you,” Conrad cut her off, and her mouth snapped shut as her brow furrowed in plain confusion. His disingenuous smile returned, creeping across his thin lips and making my skin crawl. “You’re a critical thinker.”

The girl just blinked at him.

“Learning how these creatures work will be a large part of your training,” he continued.

“Why was the death of the Imprimis a bad thing?” another student asked, effectively changing the subject.

I c****d my head to the side curiously at the girl, as I observed the dissatisfied look on her face.

“The death of the Imprimis caused a vampire uprising,” Conrad explained. “It was a vicious resistance to the possibility of the entire species being exterminated, after an estimated 40 to 50 percent of their population died with the Imprimis.”

“How can one vampire turn so many?” the same student asked.

“He’d been at it for centuries,” Conrad replied. “In his final months, he was building an army. He was turning as many humans as he could. We don’t know why.” Another terribly insincere smile. “But that’s not why we’re here today. If you have a burning curiosity about the Imprimis,” I could feel his eyes on me, and I tried my damndest to ignore him, “please feel free to speak to Hazel after this demonstration.”

I wanted nothing more than to sic whatever pissed off vampire they were about to bring through that creaky old door on him.

But unfortunately, I couldn’t risk f*****g up my own funding. Especially not because my sister, Hannah, Conrad’s wife, was standing right next to him. I’d done my very best to avoid looking at her since the second I’d arrived.

Conrad pulled his walkie talkie from his belt. “Bring him in.”

My heart leapt into my throat and I instinctively reached down with both hands to feel the cool, rough leather handle of my trusty blades strapped to my thighs.

Conrad and Hannah backed into the crowd of spectating students, leaving me by myself to face the incoming monster. I slid my blades out of their holsters.

And as always, I was barraged with emotions—exhilaration, a bloodthirsty sort of anticipation, an annoying pressure to keep all of the fuckers in this room safe, and an uncontrollable angerthat bubbled up inside me like hot lava.

But then, as always, there was a little, tiny voice in my head. A small voice of fear, fear that the vampire that was about to come snarling through that door would be—

BANG!

This wasn’t who I was afraid it would be, and for that, I was grateful. The door was thrown open and I immediately dropped into a defensive crouch, my muscles coiled as I prepared to launch myself directly in harm’s way. The vampire was straitjacketed and gagged, and that was never a good sign. He was already putting up a hell of a fight, struggling against his restraints so violently that I heard fabric rip. He screamed against the gag in his mouth. I sighed, already exasperated, as the two fuckers who dragged him into the room quickly loosened the straps of his straitjacket and tore it off of him. As they did so, he registered what was happening, when his crazed, highlighter green eyes met mine.

The next few seconds were a blur of impossibly fast movement.

He shoved the hands of Conrad’s do-boys off of him and he came barreling into me. Vampires were much faster than any human vampire hunter, no matter which drugs Conrad may have pumped into a vampire’s system, and no matter how good any hunter may have been.

He landed a few good blows directly to my face, and I gritted my teeth to avoid crying out, before I managed to wedge my feet between our bodies and pushed him back just enough to plunge one of my blades into the side of his neck. He howled in pain, muffled by his gag, and threw himself off of me, falling flat on his back on the dirty floor, his blood pooling quickly.

He was obviously stunned. Drugged. Probably scared.

I followed him, as he scrambled to his feet and fumbled with his gag. He backed himself against the wall, and he managed to get one of the straps on the back of his head undone, before I stepped right up to him, took hold of the handle of my blade and yanked it hard across his throat. He made a wet, gurgling sound, and I grimaced. Both of his hands flew to cover his wound, as if he were trying to hold it closed. He fell to his knees, his eyes locked on me, panicked. I slid my blades back into their holsters, gripped the sides of the vampire’s face, and with a grunt of effort, I ripped his head off.

His lifeless body slumped against the wall. My back still to the students, I reached up to gingerly touch my cheekbone, just to the left of my eye—I felt my own blood pouring down my face. Ugh. I probably needed stitches.

Behind me, Conrad began to speak again. “When you come across a vampire outside these walls, they won’t be gagged. We administer suppressants to the ones we capture. The vampires out there won’t be drugged.”

I turned to face the students. “The ones out there will toy with you, they’ll break your bones, they’ll bite you.”

Hannah’s face twisted in plain disapproval.

Right.

I wasn’t supposed to “scare the students away”. She and Conrad both chose to disregard the simple fact that nothing I could say had the same potential to scare away a new student as their demonstrations.

Conrad continued to drone on, but I tuned him out. I glanced back down at the vampire’s body, and at the fresh blood splattered on the dingy yellowed walls. I watched as the deep crimson continued to pool and spread on the cracked floor. All of it, new stains. The overpoweringly strong metallic smell was giving me a headache. It was always worse in such a small space.

I didn’t wait around for Conrad to dismiss me. I pushed through the crowd of saucer-eyed students to leave, and anyone I touched with my bloodied hands recoiled with disgust.

As I walked down the hallway to the staircase, Conrad’s staticky voice came through on the walkie talkie on my belt, and I jumped.

“Cleanup in the demonstration room.”